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Black Duck takes on Open Source Myths

Black Duck Software have published an analysis of their open source software database, setting out to debunk five myths about open source software. Black Duck create their database by trawling the internet, collecting downloadable code; this covers around 170,000 projects hosted on nearly 4,000 different sites.

"Open Source is just source code" is the first myth Black Duck take on. They noted that only 15 per cent of what is released by developers is code; the rest is made up of "binaries, open source projects that are packaged with scripts, markup language files, graphics images, documentation and many other artifacts". "Open Source adoption is mostly application infrastructure" was next on the list with Black Duck finding that components, and not fully formed applications dominated.

Black Duck also took on the assessment that "There are a few billion lines of code out there", saying that this figure was an order of magnitude too low. One myth, they said, was "Real programmers do NOT comment" which appears not to be true, with the analysis showing one comment for every four lines of code written by open source developers.

Finally, they addressed "GPL Version 3 is being ignored", pointing out that over 6,300 projects had been released under GPL3 and predicting, if current trends continue, that the GPL3 will surpass the BSD licence in project usage within a year or two.